Been a while since I last had to debug some basic AppleScript – and it’s fair to say programming and scripting really aren’t my cup of tea. I don’t really *know* much about either skill lately, but with Google and enough time/coffee I can sometimes roll my own or call out simple errors in others’ code.

To help solve today’s problem (a script saving a file to the wrong location despite path names apparently being set correctly) it really helped to do two things:

Use the “say” command to announce each stage of the script task, sometimes announcing the situation (such as pass or fail of an “if” statement or similar).

Use the “say” or “display dialog” command to announce key variables as they are set or manipulated. Dialogs are useful for long strings (like the full file name path I was working on) as they can remain visible until you click OK.

They’re really silly or “childish” for pro programmers I’m sure, but they really helped me understand the code and its structure, so that I could see where a variable was being misinterpreted and apply a fix.